Austin City Limits Fest

11:59 am

Wed October 9, 2013

The Austin City Limits Ticket Crash of 2013

Day One of 2012's Austin City Limits fest. With the festival's expansion, hundreds of tickets for ACL's second weekend are available on the secondary market.

KUT

Update: Austin City Limits Music Festival organizers just announced tickets are officially sold out for their second weekend. But tickets are still available on the secondary market, although they're selling fast there too.

Original story (Oct. 4): Don’t have tickets for the 2013 Austin City Limits Music Festival? Surprisingly, you’re in luck.

It’s the first year the popular fest has expanded to two weekends. And while tickets for this weekend are officially sold out on the ACL website, and next weekend’s three-days passes still retail for $225 – hundreds of passes are now available for either weekend from ticket reseller StubHub, starting at around $100. And that’s not even taking Craigslist into account, where there's a similar buyer’s market.

“What it suggests – at least so far – is the people who priced the tickets initially seemed to have forgotten that the second weekend is a novelty, and maybe there wouldn’t be quite so much demand for a second weekend,” says Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Lets say this weekend turns out to be a great success, people love the music and think that next weekend’s is going to be as good – it wouldn’t surprise me if those prices went back up again,” Hamermesh says. “You never know. If this weekend turns out to be a bomb, my guess is those will go down."

Austin City Limits sure leaves a big financial footprint: In 2012, the festival was estimated to have generated over $100 million in local economic impact, according to a city-endorsed study. This year, ACL is expected to draw tens of thousands to Austin over the next two weeks. Twenty-five percent of festival participants come from outside of Texas and around the world, with most U.S. visitors will come from California, and most international visitors arriving from Mexico.